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April 29, 2017

Youthful Organization

Maintaining Youth of the Organization and Preventing Old Age

“Like people and plants, organizations have a life cycle. They have a green and supple youth, a time of flourishing strength, and a gnarled old age. But organizations differ from people and plants in that their cycle isn't even approximately predictable. An organization may go from youth to old age in two or three decades, or it may last for centuries." John W. Gardner in 1965 October Issue of Harper's.

So keeping an organization youthful is a top management challenge.

Comparing an organization to an animal in biological terms is useful. But as we see now-a-days, the average productive age of humans has increased and some individuals are running marathon at age 71 at almost with the same time that they recorded at the age of 21, organization can maintain their strength and energy for many many years. There are certain organizations who completed 100 years of their existence and still going strong. Of course there are many examples of company closures and mergers who far outnumber the 100 year old organizations. That is why maintaining a youthful organization that can research the market, develop new products, produce them, sell them and service them with the same vigor as it was doing in its earlier years.

Actively hiring young employees periodically is way for maintaining the youthful organization. The company must be ready to train young people for front line operating jobs, supervisory positions and manager level positions.

One example is, Starbucks engaging its supply chain in partnership with LeadersUp, a new workforce intermediary, to increase the hiring of youth. LeadersUp offers multiple services: identifying barriers to youth employment across the supply chain, designing employer-led interventions (training, on-the-job mentoring, and organization redesign to create career pathways for opportunity youth), and measuring the return on investment of youth hiring activities.

This book on organization theory adopts a distinctive stance. In contrast to the traditional rational approach, it develops a transformational perspective which focuses on the organizational world as a projection of each organizational member's consciousness. While covering all the basic topics of organization theory, the author's approach reflects today's changing management paradigms.https://books.google.co.in/books?id=RVjyaVvEGHoC